Today we're excited to spotlight Zero Repeat Forever by G.S. Prendergast.

 Read on for more about G.S. Prendergast and her book, an guest post, plus an giveaway! 

Meet G.S. Prendergast!

G.S. Prendergast is the author of the award-winning and multi-nominated young adult novels in verse, Audacious and Capricious, and The Nahx Invasions series. Her book Zero Repeat Forever won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize. She lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her family. Connect with her on Twitter @GabrielleSaraP.

 Website * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram * Amazon Author Page

Meet Zero Repeat Forever!

The 5th Wave meets Beauty and the Beast in this fast-paced and heart-stopping novel about an invasion of murderous creatures and one girl fighting for her life at the end of the world.

He has no voice or name, only a rank, Eighth. He doesn’t know the details of the mission, only the directives that hum in his mind.
Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall.

His job is to protect his Offside. Let her do the shooting.
Until a human kills her…

Sixteen-year-old Raven is at summer camp when the terrifying, armored Nahx invade. Isolated in the wilderness, Raven and her fellow campers can only stay put. Await rescue. Raven doesn’t like feeling helpless, but what choice does she have?

Then a Nahx kills her boyfriend.

Thrown together in a violent, unfamiliar world, Eighth and Raven should feel only hate and fear. But when Raven is injured, and Eighth deserts his unit, their survival comes to depend on trusting each other…

Amazon * B & N * Indiebound

~ Guest Post ~

GOING VIRAL: An Author’s Adventure on “BookTok”

Have you ever wondered what happens when a three-year-old book goes viral on TikTok? Last month I learned the this for myself. Briefly, it’s a wild and unexpected ride. 

For most people over 16, TikTok is a somewhat mysterious, and sometimes annoying social media habit for kids and teens. But there are growing numbers of adults on TikTok, many of them professional influencers, artists and entrepreneurs who make it part of their business model. 

For a social media platform that has been live for a couple of years now, Tiktok is surprisingly devoid of traditionally published authors, who still dominate on Twitter. That said, TikTok does have a very large contingent of avid readers—the customary hashtag “Booktok” has over 1.5 billion views; and thousands of TikTokkers use this hashtag everyday. I knew none of this before October 13, 2020 when I was contacted on Twitter by TikTok user @alexandradesignga, a USA based writer and crafter named Alyse Cline. 

She had read my YA novels Zero Repeat Forever and Cold Falling White, and wanted to know if there was going to be a third book. I gave her my standard, and I think, quite sensible answer, which was that no third book was planned but she could contact my publisher and let them know she wanted one. I’ve given this answer to probably a hundred people since the book was published. Reasonable, right? I’d like to write a third book. My fans want one. It’s only natural that I would want my publisher to know this.

A day later, Alyse contacted me by private message on Twitter to inform me that the books were sold out on Amazon. She had posted a “Booktok” about the books that was going viral. (If you can't click the link for the Booktok, copy this link and paste in a separate browser: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexandradesignga/video/6883264838412373254 ) It had over 50K views at that time. I couldn’t believe it. My three-year-old book was getting hundreds of comments like “Just clicked ‘Buy Now’”, “Ordered both” and “Just downloaded from Audible”. What was happening? 

After that, things moved FAST. The Amazon ranking for Zero Repeat Forever started climbing from its starting point of about 500,000 to peak at just over 1000 two days later. Hardcover and paperback were sold out. Kindle and Audiobooks both took #1 spots in “Alien Science Fiction”.  In the much more competitive Teen Sci-fi list my books were in positions 11, 21, 43, 51 and 69. I lost track of how many top 100, top tens and even top 5s I made. My favorite accomplishment however has got to be making #2 Audiobook Romance for Teens, nestled cozily between Stephanie Meyer and Cassandra Clare!

Then a Hollywood casting agent contacted me about pitching the book to her producers. And a Canadian film producer contacted my agent. This was starting to get weird. Alyse’s BookTok, and several follow-ups had over 200K views, nearly 40,000 likes and thousands of comments. And people were still buying them. It was a bestseller on Book Outlet (where it was, thankfully, in stock). It was out of stock at Barnes & Noble and the Canadian retailer, Chapters. By this time I had joined TikTok myself and people were contacting me to tell me either that they had purchased the books or to tell me how much they loved them!

I was elated. A series I had only recently declared “dead in the water” had been given new life, all from one enthusiastic Tiktokker.

As I write this, two weeks have gone past. The original video is still getting thousands of views a day (over 275K now) and the books, though they remain out of stock at Amazon are still on multiple top 100 lists including teen science fiction (#51), Most Wished For Teen Science Fiction (#8) and Most Wished for in ALL Teen books, where the out-of-stock paperback is #71. My agent is talking to film and TV producers. My Twitter, Instagram and TikTik follower count is growing.

But more than this, dozens of readers have been contacting my publisher on Twitter, Instagram and by email, demanding a third book, so many that someone at Simon & Schuster emailed my agent to complain. Oops. I know to them this might seem like a carefully coordinated campaign of harassment, but I swear it emerged completely organically. I guess my fans are just passionate. 

If you’re a writer I’m sure you’re hoping I’ll answer the most obviously question: how do I make this happen for me? Unfortunately I don’t know. Like I said, this all happened spontaneously, so I can’t really take credit for it. 

I will say two things that I think made a difference: One, the original video was very focused on the fact that the third book wasn’t being picked up by Simon & Schuster. I’m not sure why this resonated so much with people that many thousands of them bought the books, sometimes sight unseen. Maybe they were attracted to the idea of being part of a grassroots movement against the “big bad publisher”. Many commented that they had been disappointed about an unfinished series before.

 The second thing that might have made a difference is that Alyse liked and responded to almost every single comment (all 2000+ of them) on her original post, as well as posting multiple updates (thankfully this benefitted her as well; her follower count climbed from about 1400 to nearly 9000 at the time of writing) and replying to comments on those as well. I tried to like and reply to many of the comments too. It may be this does something to the TikTok algorithms, though like all social media algorithms they are very opaque. 

While this experience on the whole has been positive, the downside is that it has taken up a lot of my time—responding to comments, figuring out TikTok myself, preparing material for the interested producers—when I’m supposed to be finishing a YA romcom, writing a middle grade book for which I got a Canada Council grant, and preparing for Nanowrimo. And…Simon & Schuster still don’t want a third book. They’ve made that abundantly clear. To be honest, I feel worse for my readers, and everyone who took part in this spontaneous viral moment, than I do for myself. I feel like I owe them a third book.

Maybe I can publish it in 60 seconds bursts. 

On TikTok.

Zero Repeat Forever

By: G.S. Prendergast

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Release Date: August 2017

*GIVEAWAY DETAILS*

~ Two Winners ~

 One winner will receive a signed hardback copy of Zero Repeat Forever (G.S. Prendergast) ~ (US/Can Only)

 One winner will receive a signed paperback copy of Zero Repeat Forever (G.S. Prendergast) ~ (US/Can Only)

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